Yesterday I realized that I had sort of forgotten a huge batch of aspen photographs from this fall in the eastern Sierra Nevada. How can one “forget” a big batch of such photographs, you ask? I simply became busy working on several other projects and after I moved on to them I stopped thinking about the earlier work.
I have so many of them — with more to come! — that I’m not going to string them out and post one at a time. Instead, here is one big batch of them all in one post. To save typing, all are from the eastern Sierra Nevada in October 2014
Autumn foliage on a steep, rocky eastern Sierra Nevada slope
This is a bit of a complicated photograph, and I’ll try to make some sense out of it below. The back story is that I was in the eastern Sierra doing some fall color photography, and early on this Saturday morning I had gone to a fairly popular location for photography. It is a place that I’ve photographed many times, going all the way back to a few years ago just before the huge popularity of digital cameras began to bring sometimes-overwhelming numbers of photographers to the area. I was quite sure that there would be large groups there on this morning, including photography workshop participants lined up along the shoreline of the nearby lake, but I also knew that there would be plenty of other things for me to photograph without joining the crowd.
I began by making some photographs of small things — little vignettes of a few aspen leaves, some rocks and boulders, light shining through branches holding colorful leaves. As I did this I saw that the far side of the canyon was going to remain in shadow after the sun began to wash things out elsewhere, so I decided to use a long lens and photograph trees and rocks in that location from a distance. Most of the photographs feature more obvious subjects such as an individual grove of colorful trees, but in this one I decided to just go with the complexity of the scene, which includes broken rocks, brush, and a few small aspen trees.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
An old tree stands above an eastern Sierra Nevada valley full of autumn aspen color
I got a somewhat late start on first day of this year’s trip to the Sierra to photograph the annual aspen color transition. The plan was to begin in the Tahoe area, since I needed some photographs of that region, and to then work my way down the east side of the range as far as Bishop. This was to be a somewhat complicated trip, since I’m concurrently working on a number of projects, not all of which are related to this photography! For this reason and others, I wasn’t able to leave early in the morning like I usually do, but I figure that this would still get me to some of the good aspen areas by the late afternoon hours of good light.
I went into the Sierra on highway 88 and climbed toward the Sierra crest at Carson Pass. Although the west side of the crest isn’t typically the best place to look for aspens, this pass is a bit of an exception, and I saw my first colorful autumn aspens well before the pass. There were more and more of them as I got closer to the pass, and I stopped to photograph some of them in the good light from the west. Before long I crossed Carson Pass and started down the east side toward Hope Valley, an area with lots of aspen trees. My first stop was not far below the pass, where I found this weathered old roadside tree standing high above the upper valley, where aspens were changing color in the background.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Fall color in a dense aspen thicket along an eastern Sierra creek
The exact location of this grove probably doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t seem necessary or even useful to reveal it here. With just a bit of looking about you can find many groves that are equally interesting all over the Sierra Nevada at this time of year, but especially on the east side of the range. I had seen this grove from a distance in the past, and once or twice before had thought to approach it on gravel roads. In fact, it is possible that I actually did visit or drive past at some point in the past. But for no particularly logical reason, on this trip I spotted it again from a distance and decided to go there and poke around.
In addition to its relative inaccessibility and lack of popularity, this grove has a couple of other things going for it. Many of the Sierra aspens tend to be somewhat small and not always straight. Such trees do have a special charm and I photograph them all the time. However, to be honest, sometimes California aspen photographers can be just a bit jealous of those groves of giant, straight and tall trees that seem to be more common in some other western states. This grove has those trees — tall and straight and towering above. In also has one of the densest examples of undergrowth that I’ve seen in the Sierra. My initial idea was to walk deep into this grove in the late afternoon as the light diminished, but I quickly figured out that this wasn’t likely given the dense bead of overlapping fallen tree trunks, thick brush, and thorn plants. So instead of trying to get through that jungle, I changed my mind and decided to make it the subject of the photograph instead.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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